His thoughts travelled on. He recalled the long dull spring in New York after his break with Susy, the weary grind on his last articles, his listless speculations as to the cheapest and least boring way of disposing of the summer; and then the amazing luck of going, reluctantly and at the last minute, to spend a Sunday with the poor Nat Fulmers, in the wilds of New Hampshire, and of finding Susy there–Susy, whom he had never even suspected of knowing anybody in the Fulmers’ set!
She had behaved perfectly–and so had he–but they were obviously much too glad to see each other. And then it was unsettling to be with her in such a house as the Fulmers’, away from the large setting of luxury they were both used to, in the cramped cottage where their host had his studio in the verandah, their hostess practiced her violin in the dining-room, and five ubiquitous children sprawled and shouted and blew trumpets and put tadpoles in the water-jugs, and the mid-day dinner was two hours late-and proportionately bad–because the Italian cook was posing for Fulmer.
Lansing’s first thought had been that meeting Susy in such circumstances would be the quickest way to cure them both of their regrets. The case of the Fulmers was an awful object- lesson in what happened to young people who lost their heads; poor Nat, whose pictures nobody bought, had gone to seed so terribly-and Grace, at twenty-nine, would never again be anything but the woman of whom people say, “I can remember her when she was lovely.”
But the devil of it was that Nat had never been such good company, or Grace so free from care and so full of music; and that, in spite of their disorder and dishevelment, and the bad food and general crazy discomfort, there was more amusement to be got out of their society than out of the most opulently staged house-party through which Susy and Lansing had ever yawned their way.
It was almost a relief to tile young man when, on the second afternoon, Miss Branch drew him into the narrow hall to say: “I really can’t stand the combination of Grace’s violin and little Nat’s motor-horn any longer. Do let us slip out till the duet is over.”
“How do they stand it, I wonder?” he basely echoed, as he followed her up the wooded path behind the house.
“It might be worth finding out,” she rejoined with a musing smile.
But he remained resolutely skeptical. “Oh, give them a year or two more and they’ll collapse–! His pictures will never sell, you know. He’ll never even get them into a show.”
“I suppose not. And she’ll never have time to do anything worth while with her music.”
They had reached a piny knoll high above the ledge on which the house was perched. All about them stretched an empty landscape of endless featureless wooded hills. “Think of sticking here all the year round!” Lansing groaned.
“I know. But then think of wandering over the world with some people!”
“Oh, Lord, yes. For instance, my trip to India with the Mortimer Hickses. But it was my only chance and what the deuce is one to do?”
“I wish I knew!” she sighed, thinking of the Bockheimers; and he turned and looked at her.
“Knew what?”
“The answer to your question. What is one to do–when one sees both sides of the problem? Or every possible side of it, indeed?”
They had seated themselves on a commanding rock under the pines, but Lansing could not see the view at their feet for the stir of the brown lashes on her cheek.
“You mean: Nat and Grace may after all be having the best of it?”
“How can I say, when I’ve told you I see all the sides? Of course,” Susy added hastily, ” I couldn’t live as they do for a week. But it’s wonderful how little it’s dimmed them.”
“Certainly Nat was never more coruscating. And she keeps it up even better.” He reflected. “We do them good, I daresay.”
“Yes–or they us. I wonder which?”
After that, he seemed to remember that they sat a long time silent, and that his next utterance was a boyish outburst against the tyranny of the existing order of things, abruptly followed by the passionate query why, since he and she couldn’t alter it, and since they both had the habit of looking at facts as they were, they wouldn’t be utter fools not to take their chance of being happy in the only way that was open to them, To this challenge he did not recall Susy’s making any definite answer; but after another interval, in which all the world seemed framed in a sudden kiss, he heard her murmur to herself in a brooding tone: “I don’t suppose it’s ever been tried before; but we might–.” And then and there she had laid before him the very experiment they had since hazarded.